Institution news
Dear Member,
On holiday in the Yorkshire Dales, the fresh air and clear blue skies gave me a chance to reflect on current events. Yorkshire is a county of superb engineering, evident in mills, canals, railways, roads, steel, and now the Advanced Manufacturing Park near Sheffield. It is also a land of great literature, and we walked in the footsteps of the Brontes.
But we should always reflect while remembering history, a lesson that I wish many of our politicians would learn.
The great thing about mechanical engineering is that the basic principles do not change, it is the opportunity for their use that changes through technology advances. It’s exciting! Additive manufacturing means that we are not limited to machining away or moulding material. Instead, we can build the most complex shapes, by growing them in similar ways to nature. And nature is the greatest example of learning from history – it has had a five hundred million year development programme. Mechanical engineers now are limited more by their imagination than by available processes. And with the announcement of a renewed space race, I am as excited and inspired now as I was when I saw the initial space programme. I do hope I live to see the first manned mission to Mars!
But, there needs to be certain controls to ensure safety and success. So I am delighted to see the independent reviews of our Institution’s systems coming to their conclusions. I raise my hands and admit that I missed an opportunity to possibly prevent some of the recent problems, as did others before me.
However, I have no regrets about calling for the special meeting when all other avenues had failed to make the necessary changes.
I am very optimistic for the future. Tony Roche has done a fantastic job and we will provide every support to his successor in May, and the new Trustees, to make all the changes needed to bring the Institution back on course to best serve its Members.
I was at first very encouraged to see social media developing, but over time, it has proved to be problematic in different ways to other communications. Where scurrilous stories used to abound in the printed press, now we have narcissists who post just to keep their faces online, trolls, and people who agonise about their numbers of “likes”.
Our Institution and other professional bodies provide a much more positive alternative – you can meet real people, many of them leaders in great technology. You can talk to them and really interact without ambiguity. You may even find they offer you a job.
You can also make friends for life, build a network, meet many coaches and mentors. That’s what I describe as a real social network!
It’s an exciting time to be a mechanical engineer, a great time for all our regions, divisions, groups, internationally to expand and improve our opportunities for interaction and development.
And sometimes, you may have a chance to just walk in the Yorkshire sunshine, indulge in the beauty of our natural surroundings and come up with some incredible free-thinking ideas for mechanical engineering. In the 100th year of the Yorkshire IMechE in 2021, wouldn’t it be fantastic to celebrate with the National Annual Dinner in Yorkshire !
Thank you,
Patrick Kniveton
Past President, Institution of Mechanical Engineers